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Saturday, June 30, 2012

think

I don't know whether the Texas GOP is objecting to the program of political indoctrination or the deprecation of knowledge, both of which are labeled "critical thinking" by progressives to give themselves political cover, but either way, I'm with the GOP on this one.

On arrival, our school district's new "science specialist" sent a letter home to parents in which she claimed to be specially trained in "progressive education" and "constructivist learning," whose goal for our science classes was, "to instill in students a commitment to defending the environment."

The notion of "critical thinking" was central to her mission, and I happened to see one of her classroom critical thinking tests. It asked, "How many of the following human activities cause global warming? (check all that apply)". Not "are claimed by some to cause" but "cause." Critical thinking apparently consists in regurgitating the approved answers, not pondering the questions, when the answers are provided by a sage who's progressive. The options were such things as "driving cars", "consuming non-local foods", "non-sustainable manufacturing", etc. The right answer from a "critical thinking" perspective was, of course, all of the above.

I wondered at what point knowledge of physics, chemistry, or biology might play a role in the class. Mere knowledge was "fine," but engaging in environmental activism was worth extra credit toward your grade. What about chemistry experiments at home or go see the meteor collection at a museum? Good activities but not relevant to your science grade. What IS applicable to your science grade? Get involved in environmental activism, find examples of non-green behaviors among your neighbors and complain, or participate in an Earth Day activity.

At the end of the year, the top science prize awarded by her was not to the kid who knew the most about physics or chemistry but to the "Most Green" student. The prize was a coffee mug. Just what a 10-yr-old girl needs most, a coffee mug, right? Well, not just any coffee mug. The "science specialist" and expert on "critical thinking" told us from the podium that this mug displayed a very important map of the world that showed "which parts of the world will be under water in 2050." Wow. We already have the map showing where in Appalachia to buy your future beachfront property. It's right there in the shaking hands of the little green girl with the latte. I wonder how many critical thinkers are buying.

[snip]

And my brother-in-law, a Life Flight helicopter paramedic for years, wanted to get a nursing degree so he could spend more time at home raising his kids. California required nursing students to pass a "critical thinking" class to get their degree. Sounds like a good idea. And who best to teach our nurses to think critically? Dr. House-style clinical pathologists? Physicists? Experts in statistical analysis? No, when mistakes may cost lives, we turn to--the English Department.

So, he took the class from one of the staff marxists and made the mistake of challenging some of her claims. He thought the point of critical thinking was to engage in back-and-forth discussions, reasoning about an issue from various perspectives. BIG mistake.

The critical thinking instructor graded assignments on "insight," which is to say, how much evidence for leftist dogma the student managed to "discover" during an assignment. I begged my brother-in-law to stop analyzing and pretend to experience leftist religious conversion. For the final assignment, which was, inevitably, "to analyze from a marxist-feminist perspective," he did as I suggested, and got an A in the class.

But not just an A, but a gushing letter from the instructor about how utterly inspiring it was to see the light of understanding finally dawning in his formerly benighted middle-aged, white, male brain. In the end, her urging him to "think more critically" had enabled him to see the "class contradictions" and "injustice inherent in" blah, blah, and he had given her hope for the future.

So this is what state-enforced "critical thinking" means in California: deprecation of factual knowledge and promotion of various progressive theories.

The NY Times is counting on a lack of actual critical thinking skills by its fan base. They label a collection of bad ideas "critical thinking," then label anyone who opposes those ideas opponents of critical thinking. Ha, ha, those Texan rubes. What's the point in even arguing with people like that? (So now, in Orwellian fashion, we don't have to.)

I'm quite sure I would part company with the Texas GOP over other issues, but on this one, they're right. Real critical thinkers should be saying no to phony critical thinking.

35 comments:

Critical thinking can't be taught and doesn't exist outside a body of knowledge.

I have to say ... we've had ongoing strife here in my district, but the administration, teachers, and board do a pretty amazing job of avoiding partisan politics and obnoxious 'values instruction.'

I remember going to a board meeting the night of the presidential election. Irvington is very Democratic (maybe as high as 70% registered Dems) and, of course, teachers as a group tend to be Democrats. So the room was packed to the beams with Democrats waiting excitedly to get word that Obama had won.

A teacher was there to have her students perform for the board -- there was way too much of that under our ousted superintendent -- and we soon learned that the kids were going to deliver little speeches about the election: what was special & unique about it, or something like that. (My memory is hazy now.)

Obviously, what was special about that particular election was that the country was about to elect its first black president -- and, of course, that president was a Democrat. So it seemed like there was a right answer embedded in the assignment.

I braced myself. I was thinking: the 2 kids whose parents are voting for McCain are going to stick out like sore thumbs, and there's going to be a tightening of faces and a radiating of unspoken disapproval....

And there was nothing of the kind!

Sure enough, there were maybe two kids whose parents were (obviously) voting for Obama --- and they got big rounds of applause while their teachers beamed.

It really was amazing: a little moment of Americana. The whole room felt happy. It was good for little kids to talk about Obama, and it was good for little kids to talk about McCain.

We also, when C. was in 8th grade, had a fabulous interim Earth science teacher .... who showed the class Al Gore's global warming movie.

That frosted me because there's no reason to show a political work in a science class.

I emailed the teacher, and she was pretty great. She came pretty close to apologizing &, as I recall, sent me a list of the serious sources they were going to read about global warming. I think she may have told me that they were going to talk about which parts of the movie presented evidence & which didn't ---- something along those lines.

I would still have preferred they showed something more serious, BUT the fact that the teacher instantly got what I was saying signaled a general commitment to not using school time for advocacy.

On that night, the Earth Science course here in NY seems to be fantastic. I'm always surprised by how great the course is....it's a made-up, state-created course, not a real field.

But it's fantastic.

(otoh, a NY teacher explained to me that Earth Science teachers can be weak precisely because Earth Science isn't a field unto itself, which means that career changers are drawn to Earth Science because it's the quickest path to certification.)

"Critical thinking can't be taught and doesn't exist outside a body of knowledge."

That's right.

There's such a thing as logic (and teaching the logical fallacies is a good idea and something you could do at the high school level), but that's a completely different animal. 90% of the people who like "critical thinking" would blow their circuits trying to deal with formal logic.

Philosophy, math and computer science all deal with formal logic. I've never taken a class in it myself, but I've been around people who do it, and I know that students often struggle with formal logic. Logic tutoring is a good niche. My kids' private school does Aristotelian logic in middle school.

I knew someone whose husband worked for Weekly Reader. I asked to see a copy of it to see what it looked like. On the back page was a picture of a parade and the question underneath the picture was "Find four friends." I didn't know what this meant at first, but then I saw that there among the 15 or so people were four minorities marching in the parade, and that those would be the "friends". Not quite an exercise in critical thinking; more like the vocabulary used in critical thinking dialogues that demonstrate how we all get along. Or some such shit.

I realize I'm rather fighting against addressing the sense of victimization in the clipped portions -- I managed to not comment on them yesterday!

All that said, I'd say that the Earth Science teacher *was* in fact teaching at a minimum the basics of critical thinking -- and not by an explicit, content-free methodology.

Instead, as you point out, she was teaching the kids how to use research, real research, to analyze claims. Beyond that, of course, she was teaching that claims need to be analyzed!

By going through the film and seeing evidence based vs. not, looking at the wording of claims and seeing how they could be stated differently to give a different feel would also be an excellent writing and thinking exercise.

AND it gives the students actual "real life" skills -- those needed to listen to and analyze the claims made on news programs, in the media, etc.

Could it have been done horribly wrong? Sure. But like so many things in education -- the basic outline of a lesson or unit really doesn't tell you enough about how it's really going to be taught.

Sorry. A snipet of the Al Gore movie as part of a lesson could be appropriate. Taking multiple classes to show the whole thing isn't.

I have a colleague who teaches Intro to Environmental Science at my institution. They talk about climate over time and how temperature is measured. She shows graph after graph of temperature millions of years ago, and shows how low current temperatures are in comparison. At the end of every year, there is a true/false question: "The current temperature of the Earth is higher than it has ever been." 2/3 of the class gets it wrong every year, even though there is absolutely no debate that this statement is false. Students learned it was true in middle school and that's it.

A snipet of the Al Gore movie as part of a lesson could be appropriate. Taking multiple classes to show the whole thing isn't.

Absolutely!

I've actually never seen the movie .... but what bothered me, in part, was the 'habits of mind' issue .... science isn't political advocacy.

Obviously science can (and should) be used in political advocacy; I invoke the findings of learning theory and cognitive science all the tie.

Scientists can be political advocates.

But we're talking about an 8th grade Earth Science class, and what I personally want in an 8th grade Earth Science class is that students acquire knowledge of geology/ climatology/ meteorology/ astronomy/ oceanography AND knowledge of the scientific 'stance,' which is empirical, logical, mentally 'cool' as opposed to 'hot' etc.

Having worked in environment (air quality) for my entire career, I really get annoyed at what passes for environmental education in the lower grades. It's all advocacy, "green politics", how do you conserve fuel, etc. If they really want to teach aspects of environmental science, students need to know about meteorology, water transport in the ground, how drinking water systems work (we learned about that in elementary school), how pollutants are formed, how they are dispersed, how they are controlled (e.g., how are pollutants removed from a smokestack? WHich ones are removed? ) From what I see, very little of that is covered. It's all about how we should drive less, do our part, how to recycle, etc etc.

However, if what you know about those topics stops after gaining an 8th grade textbook level understanding of them, I'd argue that you are not going to be very able, 20 or 30 years later to understand, let alone analyze what you are seeing on TV news or in the headlines.

So, learning the 8th grade version PLUS how to use current research and resources to evaluate claims made in the popular media would, it seems lead you to 1) more science learning in your future and 2) less gullibility of the sort we're all worried about -- on both ends of the political spectrum.

Do you think the kids in that class would look at, say, the movie Gasland the same way that students who hadn't done any analysis of popular would? Or would they be more likely to be skeptical and attempt to find information refuting or supporting claims?

I'm arguing for learning stuff, but also seeing how that stuff you learned might be twisted or used out of context (or not).

Should the whole curriculum consist of watching science-y movies and "discussing" them -- NO!

Does a single movie, along with perhaps a monthly analysis (including finding and reading research articles) of a newspaper article or news story have a place? I'd say it would.

It would certainly make the child more prepared to post comments here, as an adult...

If you're talking about the Earth science teacher C. had, the teacher didn't have the kids use real research to analyze the Gore movie; she just showed the Gore movie and they moved on. (That is C's recollection and that's certainly what I assumed at the time.)

The teacher's email to me, in which she said ***something*** about other materials the kids would or might use (I no longer recall) wasn't actually about critical thinking. 'Critical thinking' was just the surface text.

The real message was a polite, respectful, diplomatic, and warm way of saying: 'You're right, but I'm showing it anyway.'

And: 'Don't worry, I'm not proselytizing the kids. The movie is political but the class is not.' The subtext was the message, and the subtext was what I really wanted to hear. (As I say, I've never actually seen the movie. It may have all kinds of useful content.)

What I appreciated about the email is what I appreciate about my district in general -- the district frequently seems to send the message that, in so many words: 'We don't do politics in class.'

She was a fantastic teacher, btw. She came in midterm and faced a disaster. The kids were struggling terribly, and she got just about all of them back on track -- PLUS she dealt with a bullying situation Ed and I and a couple of other parents were also dealing with from afar.

(The situation involved a boy C. knew who was being bullied by a friend of C's.)

She pitched right in. I don't think I ever met her in person, but I thought she was amazing just via what C. said at home and the few emails we exchanged.

My point about the Al Gore movie is about the Al Gore movie, not the teacher.

When the goal of "critical thinking" is to tell you what to criticize and what to think, critical thinking is just Orwellian Newspeak.

But I would be happy to see real training in how to reason with incomplete and contradictory information that used such things as fictional playground disputes (he said, she said), diagnosing an engine problem, working with data that includes a lot of measurement error, the ongoing evolution of medical opinion on optimal diet, and so on.

Unfortunately, I don't hold out much hope that an educational system that can't get plain math right---how could anything be LESS inherently political than arithmetic?---could ever do a good job teaching critical thinking.

So, I'm teaching it to my kids at home, but even at home I'm trying to teach it in a content-neutral way. Inevitably, some of my opinions will turn out to be wrong, and I'd like my kids to have a toolbox of critical thinking tools that will continue to serve them regardless of how my personal opinions fare.

Yes, I was thinking of C's teacher. And trying not to get too hot and bothered by the (sort of ridiculous) examples above.

Are there crazy, opinionated teachers, and more in some subjects/grades than others. Sure. But there are plenty of crazy in both directions and when it's the people who *do* have the money and the lobbying power, etc. who are acting as the victims, it makes me...want to talk about good teaching and how to do it.

See, wasn't it better when I was talking about how to use popular media, in small doses, to teach children to think critically. (But not heaven forbid, critical thinking!). ;-)

"But there are plenty of crazy in both directions and when it's the people who *do* have the money and the lobbying power, etc. who are acting as the victims, it makes me..."

Exactly how powerful are outsiders within the school system? Isn't it always like swimming through cold molasses to change anything from the outside? And I gather from teacher remarks here that doing so from the inside isn't a picnic, either.

Note that you are making the very typical partisan mistake of seeing your political enemies as huge and scary. It's worth noting that that is often an optical illusion. Proponents of A always see proponents of not-A as threatening and powerful (whether they are or aren't), while proponents of not-A see proponents of A as threatening and powerful (whether they are or aren't). (I'm not singling you out for criticism here--almost everybody has the same optical illusion of the all-powerful "them" that is responsible for what's wrong with the world.)

"Critical thinking" is a bad term for a bad idea--the idea that you can teach students to "think" outside of an academic discipline and without a strong body of knowledge.

Willingham says in his book somewhere that "thinking" is actually usually just remembering how we solved a previous problem. The process of real thinking (solving a novel problem) is so difficult and energy-intensive that we rarely do it. What's really insidious about "critical thinking" is the way that it congratulates students for doing something (independent thinking) that they almost certainly have not done.

I'm all for the theory that kids should learn critical thinking. I'm altogether doubtful that they could do so in a Texas public school classroom.

It would quickly go the way of the squishy math books like TERC. Instead of right answers they propose an ecumenical "everybody find your way to do it," which quickly becomes "it's not enough that you have an answer, get it the way I want you to." That's not creative thinking, it's the opposite.

*Note that you are making the very typical partisan mistake of seeing your political enemies as huge and scary. *

I don't know, thinking huge corporations with very big profits are politically powerful (regardless of the party in power) is a little different than thinking that a teacher is going to warp my child's (or my own) thinking.

I find the second thing not to be a worry. People who aren't that smart and aren't making much sense and whom a child sees every day -- is usually quickly discounted by that child. Especially if that child has parents who ask about what they learn in school and discuss topics at home.

I find the comments quoted above to be the ones that evidence false victimization and "fear."

"I don't know, thinking huge corporations with very big profits are politically powerful (regardless of the party in power) is a little different than thinking that a teacher is going to warp my child's (or my own) thinking."

Big corporations don't care one bit about "critical thinking" one way or another. You occasionally see a corporation getting a foot in the door at school (Coke machines, Channel One, and credit card companies creating personal finance curricula--that last one is real, by the way), but it tends to be pretty obvious, and corporations don't care about the education issues that animate any of us. In fact, they are very likely to jump on the latest educational bandwagon. (I'm afraid to lose this comment by looking for a site, but I have a hazy recollection that when Disney created their famous planned community in Florida, the school was a progressive disaster.)

Yes, I was thinking of C's teacher. And trying not to get too hot and bothered by the (sort of ridiculous) examples above.

I haven't read the whole thread, so I must have missed something -- at least in my own example, I don't think the example I've given is crazy!

I don't believe that works of political advocacy should be shown in class, and I don't use works of political advocacy in my own class (and nor does Ed in his classes).

It doesn't matter to me whether I agree with the political position or not.

Political thought is 'hot'.....and it turns out that all the reading I've been doing on the basal ganglia relates to 'hot' versus 'cool.' (At some point I may be able to pull things together for a short post...)

Inside a classroom, I want 'cool.'

I'm basically opposed to 'critical thinking' altogether, mostly because people take the word 'critical' to mean 'hostile' or 'negative' or 'judgmental.'

I would use words like 'reasoning' and 'analysis': those are the thinking 'skills' I want my kids to develop and those are the skills I hope I'm developing on freshman composition.

The Earth Science course might actually be a model for the kind of course I personally embrace. The kids are given "Earth Science Reference Tables" which they use to find data they need and to 'draw inferences.'

Since I haven't taken the course myself, I'm not sure whether the kids are doing anything more than just looking things up (which is a great skill in and of itself).

I think they use the tables to find the appropriate data and to draw logical conclusions from that data.

Earth Science is VERY content heavy, and the kids do lots of memorization. They use the knowledge they have committed to memory to draw the appropriate conclusions from data in the tables.

There's no reason to spend any time in Earth Science class being "critical" in the sense of negative or hostile or even 'assessing.'

They're 13 years old; they don't need to be judging other people's reasoning.

They need to be learning to reason themselves, and I **think** New York's Earth science course actually pursues that goal.

I'll have to post a passage from War Against Grammar on the issue of being 'critical.'

Mulroy argues that we now live in a period where 'criticizing' ads and political speech for 'bias' is seen as the essence of intellectual work. He says this was true in an earlier period, too .... (I'll look it up.)

Now that I think of it, there's often a very interesting and paradoxical synergy between large corporations and progressive educational thought, often with regard to technology. Take for example Bill Gates and his school of the future, the craze for Smart Boards and the rush to put iPads in every student's hand.

Meanwhile, Disney is the quintessential big, bad corporation, and yet when they built the model town Celebration, FL, they went totally progressive to start with. From a 1999 NYT article:

"THE start of the school year here is just a few days away, so it was no surprise that there was a line of parents at the Celebration School office the other day. But the reason for the line was: They were queueing up to withdraw their children.

"When Celebration School first opened three years ago, some of the same people had lined up to enroll their children in the ballyhooed educational gem designed by top experts from across the country. It was to be a world-class institution that would take children from kindergarten through 12th grade in the highly planned brave new town created here by the Walt Disney Company. The school, at the literal and figurative center of the town, was to use the most advanced educational methods. And the plans even called for an adjoining teaching academy to share the innovations with educators nationwide."

"Some of the families most deeply involved in the school have transferred their children to other schools or even packed up and left town. Among them are the president of the Parent-Teacher Association and her immediate predecessor.

"The frustration has two primary causes. Some people are fed up with the potpourri of progressive methods; few textbooks are used, for instance, and, at first, no grades were given. Others are leaving because they believe the school is pulling back from that progressive approach and the innovations that drew them to Celebration in the first place."

"There's no reason to spend any time in Earth Science class being "critical" in the sense of negative or hostile or even 'assessing.'

They're 13 years old; they don't need to be judging other people's reasoning."

I'd say that the proper activities in terms of "analysis" at that age *are* doing things like looking up facts and figures and comparing what science research has shown with what's in, say, a movie, a popular youtube video or a newspaper article, letter to the editor etc.

Giving kids that age the ability to find and use facts? Seems developmentally appropriate!

My problem with the posting above is the overheated rhetoric, particularly in the description of the heroic brother-in-law and the awful professor.

If EVERY class had been like that? If he had learned nothing? Okay, that's bad. But taking one class and at least finding out about the theories that are out there and knowing how to manipulate them to get a good grade? I just don't see the problem. I'm sure that another student from that class might actually be able to write an "insightful" article about how looking at things from other peoples' opinions was a good experience for someone dealing with all different sorts of people in crises every day.

"I'm sure that another student from that class might actually be able to write an "insightful" article about how looking at things from other peoples' opinions was a good experience for someone dealing with all different sorts of people in crises every day."

That seems kind of roundabout as a method for teaching future nurses to look at medical situations from others' point of view. How about instead bringing in some guest speakers to talk about their experiences with the medical system? Here's a sample (and I think rather PC) list of possible speakers:

a non-English speaker

a wheelchair-bound person

a verbal autistic adult

a parent of an autistic or other disabled child

a high school dropout

a member of a religious minority with special medical concerns (Jehovah's Witness, Muslim, etc.)

several people who have had unfortunate experiences dealing with a hospital and a dying loved one

I'd say that the proper activities in terms of "analysis" at that age *are* doing things like looking up facts and figures and comparing what science research has shown with what's in, say, a movie, a popular youtube video or a newspaper article, letter to the editor etc.

OK, got it! That's where we're at loggerheads.

Speaking for myself & my kids, I completely disagree!

I guess partly because I **am** a journalist myself, I don't believe that most journalistic pieces should be taught in school.

(Full disclosure: some of my articles have been anthologized and used in classrooms, including college classrooms --- )

I respect journalism, and I write journalism. But I don't want my child to spend a lot of time reading and vetting and analyzing journalistic accounts of science (or anything else) in class (and in fact I wasn't thrilled when I realized that C's AP English teacher was assigning Malcolm Gladwell).

He has his whole life to read op eds.

In a science class, I want him to read a real science textbook written and/or vetted by a real scientist or scientists. (A piece of science journalism that was well-written and accurate would be great, too.)

New York's Earth science course, as I mentioned, is VERY content rich. Students have a huge amount of material to master. The class has no time to talk about op eds, and the teacher's expertise is in Earth science, not composition or reading.

Beyond that, I'm not personally keen on 'critical thinking' in the sense of students 'criticizing' other people's work.

I'm interested in students learning to construct an argument and defend it in writing, a very difficult skill to acquire.

I have to go track down that Mulroy passage...

One last thing: I do sometimes use journalistic pieces in my composition class --- but I use them because I believe they are good and useful, not because they are flawed and I want students to spend class time talking about what's wrong with the piece.

Again, I am NOT talking about 13 year olds giving a critique of journalism. I am talking about 13 year olds learning how to find out facts. You'll notice in one of my earlier comments I mentioned this not as a major part of a curriculum, but perhaps a "last Friday of the month" activity.

You'll really not find me not suggesting that kids not learn science. Neither will you find me saying that they'll be using Earth Science a lot in their real life (I'd regale you with my tales of learning Earth Science in upstate NY if I had any memory of it beyond having taken it and where the classroom was!), nor will they be using that model of text book learning to inform themselves very often as adults.

And that's okay, they'll know how to learn whatever subject it is that they do decide to know more about!

However, I DO think that being able to look up facts and figures, understand the statistics behind them (not an 8th grade skill beyond the most basic level of being told that there are statistical models for looking at results) and judge if something can be believed at all, some, or a lot is a good skill.

Also, being able to write something and know which sources are more and less factual is related to these same skills. Except on the fact-free SAT essay, of course.

(A piece of science journalism that was well-written and accurate would be great, too.) <<--

Exactly this! A comparison of the facts and the writing style of a well-written and accurate piece of science journalism vs. the same topic covered in a newspaper science story vs. a TV news story on the same topic.

I do think an 8th or 9th grader should be able to delineate (different than critique) the differences in those items. The other piece is making sure that the student knows why there are those differences and how to find resources that are more rather than less accurate.

However, I DO think that being able to look up facts and figures, understand the statistics behind them (not an 8th grade skill beyond the most basic level of being told that there are statistical models for looking at results) and judge if something can be believed at all, some, or a lot is a good skill.

I have completely and totally NOT grasped what you've been trying to say!

(I may be reaching the End of Days when it comes to being able to read online....I worry about that --- I get eyestrain at a level that makes me skim ---)

I do think an 8th or 9th grader should be able to delineate (different than critique) the differences in those items. The other piece is making sure that the student knows why there are those differences and how to find resources that are more rather than less accurate.

OK, maybe I did understand!

That is certainly an important skill (and I DIDN'T grasp that that's what you were talking about).

It doesn't fit well with the current Earth Science course, I don't think.

One of the things that continually shocks me is how poor my students are at distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources, or even at finding information period. Everyone goes on and on about how this generation is so technology-minded, but the reality is that lots of them just plug stuff into Google and then give up if they don't immediately find what they're looking for. They can't even navigate a website logically from homepage to the page they need. The validity of a given source is not even on their radar. I don't know if schools just aren't covering that idea period, or if they are covering it and kids are just tuning it out because it's too much work to think about.

"Unfortunately, I don't hold out much hope that an educational system that can't get plain math right---how could anything be LESS inherently political than arithmetic?---could ever do a good job teaching critical thinking."

My view has been (for a long time) that K-8 schools use critical thinking and understanding as cover for low expectations; as a way to make full inclusion sound better than it is. How can they increase the range of ability in a classroom and then claim to do a better job when they weren't doing a good job in the first place? How can they make real-world and thematic learning sound better? They put the onus on the student and claim that all they need is more motivation and engagement.

Glen offers some scary examples. How can you challenge those ideas when your child is in that school? Sometimes I wonder whether the school is being completely ignorant or whether they know what they are doing. They talk about "best practices" instead of "my opinion". Back when my son was in first grade, I sent a few members of the school committee a letter telling them that they need to tell parents that their kids will NOT be getting a Core Knowledge education. They should offer a copy of The Well-Trained Mind and tell parents that that is NOT the education their kids will receive. I never heard back from them.

I can't possibly get the education discussion in our town to focus on that fundamental difference in opinion. Deep down, it's all politics. I don't want to hook up with the Texas republicans because they are just pushing their own brand.

That's really unfair to education students, I think. They'll pay for or acquire debt for their degrees, which will then be nearly worthless unless they can pass this bar. It's all very well to do that to lawyers (insert favorite lawyer joke here), but not very nice to do that to nice young women who like kids and aspire to be elementary teachers. If the bar is necessary (and the "critical thinking" talk makes me wonder), why not put it at the front end as part of the initial screening process for education programs and not waste everybody's time and money?

(Here's a thought--in view of school layoffs, is this proposal aimed at limiting the number of prospective teachers competing for a limited number of jobs?)